15 - Hispanic Studies Review - Vol. 1, No. 1 (2016): 15-29 Robo Sacer: “Bare Life” and Cyborg Labor Beyond the Border in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer David Dalton The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Abstract Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008) uses the backdrop of a dystopian near future to shed light on the ways that transnational lows of labor, technology, and capital become an institutionalized state of exception that dehu- manizes the inhabitants of the Global South. Within his world, Mexican laborers use technology to virtually transport their labor to the US, and North American companies use drone warfare to defend their inancial interests. Despite the bleak conditions in the ilm, Rivera also imagines what I call robo sacer resistance. At its core, the robo sacer is a cyborg articulation of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer; as such, it is imbued with re- sistant qualities. As third-world subjects subversively use technology to undermine the prevailing structures of power, they denaturalize the suppositions that have constructed their dehumanized status. The following study tracks the potential, and shortcomings, for robo sacer resistance as represented in Rivera’s ilm. Shortly after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the Peruvian-American artist and ilmmaker Alex Rivera created “Cybracero Systems” (Martín-Cabrera 590-91), a mock corporate website that advertised a supposedly new technolo- gy in which Mexican workers would use the Internet to export their labor to robots on the U.S. side of the border. 1 According to the website, “Cybracero Systems was created with one objective in mind: to get all the work our society needs done, while eliminating the actual workers and all the diiculties that workers imply: health beneits, housing, IRS, INS, union conlicts, cultural and language diferences etc.” 2 Rivera used this parody to critique contradictory U.S. attitudes that decried the presence of Mexican bodies in national territory even as American citizens con- sumed the inexpensive labor that these bodies provided. Given the website’s problematic tone, it is signiicant to note that the director received numerous inquiries from interested parties soliciting his services (Martín-Cabrera 590). The director’s idea clearly resonated within North American circles, where the racialized economies of the earliest European colonists had pro- duced systemic racism (Omi and Winant 14-50; Feagin and Elias 935-44; Prashad 1-36; Quijano 534-35, 560-61). Rivera would later add a mockumentary, “Why Cybraceros?”, and the feature ilm Sleep Dealer (2008) to his Cybracero project. Through these media he challenged U.S.—particularly Anglo-Saxon—attitudes of white supremacy by exaggerating anti-immigrant discourse. In the short ilm, which plays like a ive minute contribution on a cable news program, a female nar- 1 The company’s name invokes the bracero movement of 1942-1964 in which large numbers of Mexicans entered the US to take agricultural jobs (Calavita 4-10). Of course, the exploitation of Mexican labor continues to exist to the present (Mize and Sword xxxii-xxxvi). The word “cybracero” also alludes to the technologized modes of production of late twentieth and early twenty-irst century industry. 2 Debra A. Castillo views Rivera’s imaginary, multimedia Cybracero project as a form of “rasquache aesthet- ics” in which people like Rivera retool and recycle images, sounds, and other media to create original pieces of art (8-11).